Slay ghosts and eat cookies in free RPG Grimm's Hollow

(Image credit: Mahum Najam)

If you enjoy Undertale and the colour purple then you'll love Grimm's Hollow, a refreshingly short JRPG that puts you in the cowl of a recently hired grim reaper. I say 'hired', but really you've arrived in a sort of purgatory after dying on Earth, and been assigned the role of reaper seemingly at random. Meanwhile, your little brother has arrived here as a ghost—the same ghosts that reapers are tasked with dispatching to the after-afterlife. Eep.

Over a couple of hours, and across multiple endings, Grimm's Hollow tells a sweet, lightly moving supernatural story that feels both big and small at the same time. There are only a few named characters, but they're memorable—particularly Baker, the bread-loving reaper who has, erm, a baguette for a face.

The battle system is surprisingly in-depth, asking you to perform a quick rhythm minigame (think Shadow Hearts) as you attack and defend against the spectral enemies. It can be a little awkward in practice, as it happens even when you're in the command menu, but even so battles are involved, and frequently tactical, accompanied by one hell of a battle theme.

Grimm's Hollow is a sweet game that doesn't outstay its welcome. You can find it on Steam or on itch.io. (Thanks, IndieGamePlus.)

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.

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